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Nellie and the Nanites - Bk3 - Ch.30
🕑 Added 2024-05-28 08:00:08 +0000 UTCChapter 30
Solo
First things first.
Nellie went over and checked out the suit Lucy was wearing. It was still showing faint power signs, but that was about all. Whatever in the suits was run by nanites had been wrecked.
Nellie was still a little low on nanites herself; the feeling of them streaming from her nanite forge was still more of a trickle than a flood. That meant repairing the suit would have to wait until her own levels were back to normal. According to her implant, that was looking close to an hour, if not longer.
The suit would probably fail long before then.
“Fuuuuuck,” Nellie groaned again.
Nellie pulled the amazingly heavy body up and over her shoulder before starting the trek back to the Indomitable. She was too used to nanite-powered muscles, Nellie decided as her back and shoulder began to ache within a few steps. What they needed was a power armor backup for situations like this. Lucy had never bothered to put them in, thanks to the nanites doing the job instead.
In some ways, Nellie realized they were…
A scuttling noise came from behind Nellie, and she whirled.
The Heavy Crawler was following her.
“Wait, why aren’t you dead?” Nellie asked, her hand creeping slowly toward her pistol.
The crawler failed to answer, which Nell realized was a pretty good thing. If it had spoken, this would all have gotten a lot creepier really quickly.
With her eyes locked on the stationary crawler, Nellie checked her connection to it through her implant.
Heavy Crawler Mk2
Connection: Secure
Nanites: 100%
Sub-drone.
“What the actual fuck?” Nellie asked, feeling the visceral shock.
Testing again, Nellie sent the command for it to back away. It did. Commands seemed to work. But how on earth did it still have Paren’s nanites in it?
Thinking back, Nellie had seen the damn thing get hit by the energy wave. It hadn’t been hidden or protected in any way.
“Status?” Nellie tried.
All systems functional.
Command listing fully functional.
Uplink to Mummy - blocked.
Current task - Serve the Queen.
“Ostie!” Nellie barked out a short, horrified laugh. She wasn’t sure what was worse, the fact that the link to Paren was listed as a link to ’Mummy’ or the fact it saw her as some kind of Queen. In a weird way, it made sense. They were insects, after all. Didn’t most insects have some kind of queen?
“Still creepy,” Nellie shook her head.
On the other hand.
Nellie trotted back toward the Indomitable with the crawler scuttling along next to her. The previously merely empty streets seemed a lot more lonely now, with not even the reassuring presence of Lucy’s voice in her head. It was strange how used Nell had become to having another person literally living in her brain. That absence felt wrong now, alien and uncomfortable.
The crawler was weirdly comforting. Nellie might be stranded and operating solo for the first time in who knew how long, but she was not alone. Which was reassuring as she saw the Indomitable sitting dark and cold where they had landed, with not so much as a flicker of power showing anywhere. Dialing up her senses only confirmed what she was afraid of.
The ship was just a lump of complicated metal shapes with the nanites dead.
“Mental note: make regular backups for nanite systems in ships,” Nellie spoke aloud, trying to push aside the howling winds and creaking sounds of stone under pressure. They had been mere background noises before, but now they seemed to roar in her enhanced ears.
At least there was a manual crank for the exterior hatch. Nellie spun it, happy to feel a little of her strength returning. Inside, the cold and dark ship was illuminated by nothing more than the flickering lights on her suit. As soon as the crawler was inside, Nellie cranked the door closed and went to try the control boards, finding them unresponsive.
“Go get the others and bring them back here,” Nellie ordered the Crawler as she opened the door again, leaving it open for now. Lucy was safely inside an interior compartment, with the door closed to keep the ash and heat out, at least for now.
She could already feel the floor beneath her feet was warming.
It might stay dark, but it wouldn’t be cold for long.
She had to find a way to get some kind of internal power for the ship, or getting Lucy and the others back here would only have delayed the inevitable.
One of the advantages of this ship being a copy of the original Bly was that she knew every inch of the damn thing, which included where to find the drive, and even how to access it.
Before getting started, Nellie went to the spare suit storage and injected some nanites into a fresh suit, leaving them to repair the thing while she got to work on the Indomitable itself. The main power generator was under the walkway in the main corridor, and Nellie was delighted to see it was just as easy to remove in the Indomitable as it had been on the original.
In place of the old generator, which used a strange ore that generated a massive gravity field, there was a reassuringly massive Nano-Forge. Running a few calculations on her implant showed it would take her almost twelve hours to inject enough nanites into it to repair and restart it, which was about six hours too long.
The heat build-up would have started to degrade the synthetic body Lucy used by then.
Nellie pulled up the blueprints for the Indomitable and scanned them carefully, looking for a backup system. She found it just as the crawler returned, Prim’s body held securely on its back.
“Good timing,” Nellie said to the metallic smile as it turned toward her, bobbing its head in strange patterns. “I need you to fetch the backup system.”
The crawler paused, let the body slide off its back, and then skittered up the wall and hung from the roof as it tore away some paneling and opened a hatch. This revealed a second, much smaller nano forge, which it promptly snatched up, crawling down the wall again and dropping it at her feet like a dog.
“Good boy!” Nellie patted it affectionately on the head, and it let out a happy rumble before scuttling out the door again.
Looking down at her own hand, wondering why she had done that.
“Ostie,” Nellie grinned. “Is Paren right? Is it actually cute?”
Pushing the thought aside, Nellie sat down and plugged a pair of tendrils into the emergency backup.
Five minutes later, the mini-forge spluttered to life in Nellie’s hands.
Power level: 1%
Nanite Production: Functional but restricted.
Time to full operation: 5 hours.
“Good enough,” Nellie said, connecting the backup to the main forge and letting it feed directly into the main generator. In a little over five hours, this place would start the long road to getting the ship operational again.
As a backup for the backup, Nellie went and collected the suit she had started repairing, using the electronics on it to activate the environmental controls in the one Lucy was wearing.
It wasn’t much, but it was enough to keep it repairable.
Nellie sat down next to the body, listening to the sounds of the winds outside.
The immediate threats had been solved, which meant she had to decide what she was going to do next.
The ship would slowly come to life; the crawler was recovering the other bodies, and they could probably be repaired. Her own systems were slowly coming back online, and the nanites would solve the issues they found without her having any further input.
The immediate danger had passed, and Nellie felt the weight of it all settle on her shoulders.
They had nearly died.
The thought echoed in her head over and over again. Lucy could have been destroyed, all because some ASSHOLES decided to put in some safeguard that killed all nanites.
Lucy could have been killed.
Her Lucy.
“I’m going to kill them all,” Nellie said, angry tears running down her cheeks. “Every one of the I.E.S. dies. For what they did to me, to others, and what they almost did to Lucy. They all die.”
===<<<>>>===
The fury spurred Nellie into action. While the smiler dragged the other bodies back, she spent the time trying to figure out how to avoid it happening again. The idea of not returning to the security center did not even occur to her. Nellie’s reasoning had been sound; they needed whatever was in that security room—more than she had known.
That weapon, whatever it was, had to be studied, and a way to protect herself and her people found. If they had not known about it when they first came across an I.E.S. fleet or ship… that could have been the end for them. Best case, they end up dead. Worst case? Nellie shuddered, remembering the first facility they had searched. The I.E.S. could do a lot worse than kill you.
Mk2 NanoRifle - Unrecoverable.
Scrap instead?
Nellie threw the rifle across the room, seeing it shatter. The damn weapons were all the same. The damage to them had been significant. It would be easier to simply build a new one than repair any of these things now.
The smiler, just entering with the last of the squad’s bodies, chirped in surprise.
“I need weapons,” Nellie grumbled at it.
The smiler sat up and split itself open, revealing the laser array.
“Thanks, but I need something a bit smaller.” Nellie patted it on the side as she went past. “I just wish I knew how you avoided that damn energy blast.”
A clunk behind her made her turn around.
The smiler had pulled off one of the chitin plates, nudging it toward her.
Nellie picked it up, noticing the strange alloy coating on the inside of it. Her enhanced senses told her enough to know it was a powerful energy-dampener.
“Uh, thanks?” Nellie handed it back.
The smiler reached up with two tiny metal arms that moved the plate back into position, where the nanites reattached it.
“Clever little guy,” Nellie gave it another pat. “Now I just need to know where to get some of that down here.”
Nellie discovered the answer almost an hour later in the garage with the half-melted vehicle. Everything she needed was right there, just not alloyed yet.
Luckily, she had a solution for that.
“Eat it, and make me some of that alloy,” Nellie commanded the sub-drone.
Ignoring the sounds of metal being torn and sheared, Nellie poked around, finding a couple of useful bits and pieces in parts boxes. There were several servos, some buckling plates, and the remains of a rusted-out pneumatics system.
Leaving the sub-drone to it, Nellie took everything back to the Indomitable.
Leaving the parts laid out in the middle of the cargo bay, Nellie started to disassemble one of the damaged suits.
Survival Crafting had seemed rather bland as a reward for her latest integration, but in the age of space travel, it seemed to mean a lot more than making lean-to shelters and how to make a stone axe.
Case in point, how to modify and repair a damaged suit.
Once she had everything spread out in pieces, Nellie returned to the garage. She found the smiler still chewing away, with several small metal balls in a pile in one corner.
“Not even asking where these came from,” Nellie said with determination as she gathered the spheres of alloy and returned to the Indomitable.
Shaping the plates was a little slow, but the thickness of the layer on the chitin plate served as a good guide. Some precious nanites were diverted from repowering her systems to help the job go a little smoother.
In less than an hour, Nellie started to reassemble the nanite suit. It was now entirely shielded by the plates, but that was just the start.
Cannibalizing the Indomitable's interior camera and monitoring systems and several pieces of deck plating allowed her to create a secondary exo-suit layer. The servos and pneumatics rendered it capable of supporting three times its own weight, most of which would be taken up by the secondary layer of shielding plates.
The final touch was a smooth, unbroken dome of the alloy that fitted over her head and covered it completely. Thanks to the cameras and sensors she had rigged up on the suit, she could see what was going on around her.
Sealing the bay completely was impossible, at least without power, which would not be on for at least a couple of hours yet.
“This is really going to suck,” Nellie steeled herself as she looked at everything laid out in front of her. She had to change suits. It was just a fact.
The atmosphere was highly acidic—also a fact.
It was also hot enough to burn skin on contact—another fact.
Nell concentrated, pushing a layer of nanites out to cover her skin and eyes. It would only last a second—two at most.
Her trembling hand reached for the emergency release button on the suit. It would blow the suit clear from her in a second. Leaving nothing but a shipsuit and a single layer of nanites between her and the heat and acidic air.
“No matter what, don’t scream,” Nellie reminded herself. “The air will cook you from the inside out.”
“Ostie,” Nellie gasped as the new suit fought to lower her skin temperature.
Vision returned slowly, and the nanites carefully rebuilt her eye. She would have had to wait in complete blackness if her other eye had not been robotic.
The pain was, well, overwhelming.
When the pain finally dropped enough for her to think properly, Nellie climbed into the exo-suit portion, clipping the plates in place before sliding the metal hood down and switching to cameras to see.
Thick cabling showed here and there, with two thinner ones vanishing under the hood and into her implant via a complex connection that Nellie had found in a folder called ‘Manual Backups.’
The servos and pneumatics were all reading green, and she could move around quite freely. More importantly, there were no nanites in the exterior suit at all.
Her metal-encased feet clanked loudly against the deck plates as she double-checked that all the interior doors were sealed and ready to power up.
Just in case.
In a little over two hours, power would return, and the systems would begin repairs. Until then, she had to hope another blast wouldn’t fry whatever was left.
She cranked the outer door closed, patted it once, and moved off toward the security center, only stopping by the garage long enough to collect the heavy crawler.
It was currently her only weapon, after all.
